1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for vibrating, grinding, crushing, milling, scrubbing, sizing and/or classifying granular material.
2. Background Art
Granular material is used in many different applications where it is desirable before reusing to clean off particles such as a binder which has adhered to the granular material. One such application is in metal castings where binder is added to sand to form the mold. The mold is broken up when the casting is made. Though the binder is largely dissolved, minute particles nevertheless remain adhered to the grains of sand and some grains of sand will remain adhered to each other. It is desirable to remove the minute particles between uses so that the ability of the sand to bind in subsequent uses is not affected. It is further necessary to separate the removed particles from the sand to obtain clean sand without undesirable fine materials mixed therein.
Another example of foreign materials adhering to a part would be where a pattern of a part to be molded is made of styrofoam with a ceramic coating. When the mold is placed in a mold box and the metal poured therein the styrofoam mostly disappears leaving small deposits on the surface of the part and in the broken up sand mold. Cleaning the sand from the binders and the after effects of the casting step, and separating the binders from the cleaned sand is necessary and can be difficult.
Further, in grinding, crushing or milling applications where it is desired to render materials to a minute size, the capacity of milling machines has been somewhat limited in view of the time required for such milling.
The present invention is directed toward overcoming one or more of the problems as set forth above.